Neal Asher - Cowl

Maxell turned to Goron. ‘Goron, don’t make the mistake of seeing Aconite forever in her brother’s shadow. Her abilities are at least equal to his, even if her intentions are not.’

Cowl hissed at this, his breath liquid against Aconite’s cheek.

‘Did you think I couldn’t plumb your technology? Did you really believe I was the poisonous failure our mother named me?’ asked Aconite.

The tendrils tightened in her head, shooting agony around her skull and down her spine. She knew he wanted her to resist, but she let him have it all:

‘So what is it you have to say?’ asked Goron, eyeing Aconite with suspicion.

‘My brother is not trying to destroy you by altering the time-line — in doing that he might well destroy himself. He has discovered he is the cause of the Nodus. Human history begins with a circular paradox. He has found no DNA-based life before that point, so it can only be caused by him. Now he applies all his energies to stop himself causing the omission paradox that could destroy the entire time-line, and thus his own ancestry.’

The laughter came from the fourth member of this group.

‘Such arrogance,’ said Palleque, shaking his head.

Maxell gave him a look. ‘Something of which we are all guilty. Please continue, Aconite.’

After a moment of puzzlement Aconite went on, ‘My brother is not the greatest danger to you, not in himself.’

‘The torbeast,’ said Palleque. He wasn’t laughing now.

Aconite nodded, ‘Already it is immense and reaches uptime to feed. Cowl cannot entirely prevent it doing this, and already the anomalies it is creating are forcing its uptime substance further down the slope generated from the Nodus.’

‘Then that will be the end of the problem,’ said Palleque.

Aconite stared at him. ‘No. My brother needs the torbeast to drop active tors, so he can sample the future and thus find out how to avoid the omission paradox—to find out if his experiments with the protoseas are having any effect — so he feeds energy to it from his geothermal taps to sustain its position on the slope.’

‘It also serves another purpose for him,’ said Palleque through gritting teeth.

Aconite turned to stare at him. ‘Then you know that, while it serves his purposes, it also feeds.’

Grimacing, Palleque turned away from her.

‘I do not yet see how his pet is the greater problem,’ said Goron.

‘As it feeds, it grows,’ said Aconite. ‘Its structure is more complex than anything else that has ever lived. It can grow organic time machines on itself… do I need to draw you a diagram?’

‘Oh,’ said Goron.

‘What does she mean?’ asked Palleque, turning back.

Maxell offered an explanation. ‘It generates its own vorpal field, and once it reaches sufficient mass that field will be strong enough to enable the beast to shift itself anywhere on the probability slope.’

‘And to feed,’ Aconite added.

‘And what precisely are we talking about here?’ Palleque asked.

‘An eater of worlds—all life, every shift-generated time-line, nothing but torbeast left.’

From her brother, Aconite felt confirmation of this, and understood in an instant that his sending of the beast against the Heliothane served two purposes: to kill his enemy and also to weaken his dangerous pet. The time frame jumped:

‘It is the only way to take it out, completely out,’ said Goron.

This time Aconite and the Engineer walked out together across the floor of one of New London’s construction bays, towards the skeleton of a giant sphere—only this time the shadow of Cowl walked beside them.

‘This was created to extend Heliothane Dominion throughout time. As a base from which to kill every last umbrathant, and finally from which to finish your brother. But perhaps now it can serve a more honourable purpose. I would wish it so.’

‘The bait seems… small.’

‘The largest fish can be hooked with the smallest fly.’

‘Will the Heliothane, as a whole, countenance the loss?’

‘Of this?’ Goron asked, gesturing to the nascent Sauros.

‘Of it all. You’ve spent two centuries on this project, and used up half the wealth of the Dominion. And just to lose it all to destroy a threat most of its citizens have never seen and many could not even comprehend?’

‘It has to be done.’

Cowl’s anger was like hot wires burning inside her skull. He was going to kill her with this and, if he did not, he would kill her later.

The tor called to everyone in the Antarctic research facility, but only Aconite intended to respond to that call. Palleque glared at the thing, but then he had more reason to hate its source than anyone else.

‘Here, I have a present,’ he said, turning to her and holding out a small glass cylinder containing white crystals. ‘We found it on Mars, in strata a billion years old, and after that on every other solid planet in the solar system, in rock of the same age.’

‘What is it?’

‘You wondered why I laughed when you said Cowl was the cause of the Nodus.’ He gestured at the cylinder she now held. ‘There were hundreds of theories on the source of that, until our interstellar probe discovered the same substance on a dead world orbiting the red dwarf, Proxima Centauri.’

‘You still haven’t told me what it is.’

‘Crystalline DNA in a protein matrix. As soon as it hits liquid water, it becomes active. In about a million years you’ve got metazoan life—and the rest is history, as they say. In the end, only one theory fits the facts.’

‘Seeding.’

Cowl released his hold and Aconite dropped to her knees, blood running from her ear and glistening over the abrasions around her throat. She glared up at her brother and tested the thick ceramal cuffs that bound her wrists and ankles.

‘How many more do you think I’d let you kill?’ she spat.

Cowl tilted his head, but said nothing. Abruptly he spun round and headed for his vorpal controls. After a moment he uttered a shriek of rage.

In the sky, the spectral display of the torbeast juddered and bled away as, unnoticed, a raft drew into the citadel’s shadow. With the energy feed severed at Sauros, a backlash rippled downtime from the city, taking no time at all, and for ever. Cowl withdrew his sharp fingers from the vorpal ovoid, and stepped back, turning his head to see lightning flashing between temporal capacitors and transformers. The sea boiled as safety trips attempted to divert the surge into the water. It was like trying to hold together a broken dam with Sellotape. Under the sea flare after flare ignited then died to dull red, stepping out in tens then hundreds then thousands towards the horizon, as geothermal generators vaporized and melted surrounding rock. Shortly after, explosions, as from depth charges, followed the same course. Inside the citadel darkness was lit up by machinery fires, then dispelled when auxiliary generators cut in. Emergency lights came on all over the structure, and Umbrathane ventured from their places of safety.

Clinging to the ledge, in the shadow of the out-flowering walls of the citadel above, Tack gazed at the other occupants and saw how they had accumulated. The torbearer in armour had been the first, his weight dropping him directly down from the chute mouth and, with whatever strength had remained to him, he had driven his dagger into a crevice where the ledge joined the pillar. There he must have died, for Aconite had not rescued him, and over time the rust from his armour had stuck him to the ledge. After him had come others: someone wearing a long robe had fallen, the material of which had snagged on one of the knight’s greaves; arm bones had accumulated around these two, and other skeletons had become stuck to the ledge with the adipocere of decay. Occasional ornaments gleamed and weapons rusted. Tack noted a burnt-out Heliothane carbine resting against a ribcage enclosed in parchment skin, the weapon’s black metal and plastic partially melted and turned grey with salt, and wondered about the story behind that. Then, keeping his foot firm against the adhesive mine, he raised the harpoon launcher he had taken from Aconite’s armoury and fired upwards.